1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image organizing device and an image organizing method for classifying and organizing a part of or all of a plurality of images into at least one group, as well as a computer-readable recording medium storing a program for causing a computer to exert control to implement the image organizing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Since the cost of photographing using a digital camera is lower than that using a silver salt film camera by the cost of the films, users of digital cameras tend to photograph more images. This tendency is further promoted by the increase in capacity of recording media for use with the digital cameras, which are removably mounted on the digital cameras. Consequently, a huge number of images may be stocked in a storage medium, such as a recording medium of the digital camera, or a hard disk of a personal computer or a CD-R, on which image data read out from the recording medium is stored. The stocked images often contain both necessary images (good photos) and unnecessary images (defective photos, overlapping photos, or the like), and such images often remain unclassified.
It is very troublesome to classify and organize a large number of images. Therefore, a device for supporting a user to search and extract necessary images, extract and delete unnecessary images from the stocked images, and classify and organize the necessary images based on the date and time and the location of each of the events of the scenes in the images has been proposed.
Proposed techniques include, for example, automatically classifying a plurality of images with respect to the time and the event (similarities between the images based on image analysis) (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,411), automatically classifying with respect to the shooting location and the shooting date and time (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-037992), and automatically classifying with respect to associated information (such as the shooting date and time) and secondary information (such as the weather, the country name) obtained from the associated information (such as the shooting date and time, the GPS information) (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-271617).
Further, a technique has been proposed where a user defines his or her desired classification pattern as classification conditions and stores the classification conditions in the digital camera. When the user has photographed images using the camera, his or her classification condition is described in the tag of each photographed image, so that the images photographed by the user are classified according to his or her classification conditions (see, for example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20050271352).
However, in the automatic classification techniques described in the above-mentioned U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,411 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 2005-037992 and 2003-271617, uniform classification conditions are applied to images of all users to carry out uniform image organizing operations. Therefore, the result of the classification does not necessarily meet the point of view of classification desired by each user. Although the technique described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20050271352 allows the user to carry out classification on a viewpoint desired by the user, it is troublesome for the user to associate the images with the classification conditions at each time of photographing.